Wednesday August 3: Adelboden to Lenk
Adelboden was yet another town that might well be a charming place to stay, but where we had no time to do anything but try to recover from one day’s walk and build up stores for the next. It has lots of outdoor shops, anyway.
Today was another easy walk. We took a flat path up the river to a cablecar that transported us up to the long balcony walk called the Blumenweg, or flower path. It was truly beautiful.
This area is built up with various tourism options. The trail is paved in places to facilitate the use of mountain bikes and scooters, which look terrifying to me. This particular path is also very popular with older people and anyone who wants a pretty walk with pretty views without having to kill themselves climbing up or down on rugged terrain.
We tried to get lunch at the Metsch cablecar station but it was too crowded, so we just took the car down to the valley. We could’ve done a long walk through the Simmefall waterfall, but chose not to.
At the bottom of the cablecar, it was a simple, flat walk along a river into town. Our hotel was oddly unstaffed – everyone’s keys were laid out on a desk with their names, but no one was there. We went swimming in the hotel’s pool, where the owner’s grandsons were cavorting for hours. We attempted to use the sauna but couldn’t figure out how to turn it on, and there was no one to ask for help.
We took a walk and saw that the local high school, out of session for the summer, had turned its cafeteria into a lunch place, clearly aimed at retirees. The menu and prices looked pretty good, but we thought we would feel out of place. And also, we didn’t spend all this money to come to Switzerland and eat at a high school cafeteria.
The town felt very dead. Instead of looking for an evening’s entertainment, we got dinner supplies at the Coop and had another private balcony party at our hotel. It’s a treat to be able to sit and watch the sun go down on the mountains.
